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Admittedly I don't pay much attention to Openings and Endings, so you'll have to forgive me for asking but...is there really that much difference between the two? Or rather a big enough difference that means both deserve their own category? I mean I've seen plenty of anime where they end an episode on a theme that they later use as an Opening.

Admittedly I don't pay much attention to Openings and Endings, so you'll have to forgive me for asking but...is there really that much difference between the two? Or rather a big enough difference that means both deserve their own category? I mean I've seen plenty of anime where they end an episode on a theme that they later use as an Opening.

You mean difference as in Best OP and Best ED will be won by different anime, I can see that will happens. there is quite big difference of quality between ED and OP. also it usually a different "genre".

I usually put OP and ED together since it is the blend of music with the visuals that I rate first when I nominate a ED and OP. I did it with Ohisama because the cheerful and tongue-in-cheek tone of the song goes very well with the rather surreal school play. Feel so Moon also comes in mind. Oldest example I have in mind for what I mean about blend of visuals and music would be Drivers High, the GTO OP. For 2013, expect me to nominate So no Chi no Sadame, the first OP of JoJo's Bizarre Adventures, and Out of Control, the second OP of Psycho Pass.

Honestly... with all respect to the people who worked so hard on this, I think it's just too much of a PITA to vote. I know I looked at the list and the procedure and just couldn't be bothered -- sorry. If it were more like a regular poll in some way (not that we can *actually* use a regular poll), I think you'd get more traction. Of course, the fact that it does require more effort suggests perhaps that the people who participate are more likely to have put some thought into it (rather than just randomly clicking things), so it's a trade-off. But I'm not sure you'll really attract a huge audience as long as people have to follow such a precise way for doing things (which I know is good for automation... but at this level of participation, you could just count it by hand in an hour anyway).

Anyway, again, this is not meant as a slam against those who worked on this project and made it happen, which I think is great... but just a suggestion if we want to help the project gain more traction this year. I guess we have a while to work on it, anyway.

(That aside, I personally do think there would be merit in having separate categories for OP and ED. Then again, I'm the sort of person who basically always watches the openings and endings, so they're a big part of shows to me.)

Looking at past years it seems the vote count is consistent. There was more last year but it could be because of more big profile shows like Madoka & Steins Gate competing against each other.

As for opening and endings, I think there are enough categories as is so combining it as best credits makes sense to me. That being said I expect openings will always have the advantage since usually more effort is put into opening sequences (there are always exceptions of course).

Anyways I like how it's done now. I expect this contest attracts those of us who like to make are own yearly favorite lists on blogs, tumblr, etc. It does take effort but I think the contest is more fun that way.

I wonder if there's any way we could have this work like voting in ISML?

In other words, just select a radio button per selection. Very quick and easy.

It would require some offsite tools do that since AS polls obviously don't work for something of this size, but it would invalidate some things like AS membership join date, or even fields asking AS name could be lied in, or lead to odd requirements like you must post in the thread with X time of doing it, or your votes would be ignored .

as long as people have to follow such a precise way for doing things (which I know is good for automation...

With the exception of the best character / opening theme categories (which were introduced precisely because we could check them) the format is actually the same as in other years. We don't really advertise it but we can actually parse every piece of nonsense posting out there (that's not troll level bad), you don't actually have to follow the format exactly; all the variants we have ever seen used previous to the automation are supported, we just don't turn it all on until we need to do final counts; showing more strict errors in formatting helps deter mistakes.

Quote:

Originally Posted by relentlessflame

but at this level of participation, you could just count it by hand in an hour anyway).

From experience in the contest from 2 years ago (when Haak took over), it's more like an hour for 1 category and the likelyhood of errors is quite high (we had several people cross count to check for errors). With the scripted method it's quite low, and we don't have to manually sort though all the series aliases and other nonsense, with the exception of corner cases such as a character being mentioned by some obscure nickname (we had I think 1 or 2 this year, not a big deal).

Basically the logistics of counting so many is a nightmare, too much for any sane person to do alone (Ansalem at the time) so at least with this method, with it being a press of a button, the show will go on fairly easily.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Triple_R

I wonder if there's any way we could have this work like voting in ISML?

In other words, just select a radio button per selection. Very quick and easy.

Making that sort of site is easy. The problem is, like I told Seiji when he mentioned it, animesuki would have to provide an open authentication server so that we can (securely) assert: (a) people are members of the site, (b) every member gets only 1 vote (c) no funny business is happening (people are creating multiple accounts with no posts), etc.

(I do like reading people's thoughts on things though, that come along with the votes, especially in nominations)

It would require some offsite tools do that since AS polls obviously don't work for something of this size, but it would invalidate some things like AS membership join date, or even fields asking AS name could be lied in, or lead to odd requirements like you must post in the thread with X time of doing it, or your votes would be ignored .

And the nomination phase would honestly be worse with such a format.

I agree with you on nomination phase. I think that's good the way it is.

you don't actually have to follow the format exactly; all the variants we have ever seen used previous to the automation are supported, we just don't turn it all on until we need to do final counts; showing more strict errors in formatting helps deter mistakes.

Well, it does help deter mistakes, but I think it also helps deter participation a bit to see all these "error reports" posted that other well-meaning people didn't do it right. I get the objective in posting it (to help people better understand what is expected), but it takes away from the "user-friendliness".

As for the authentication API to validate the participants... it could be possible. Just need to think about how to program it. For example, we could potentially host a script on the forum server that validates your login credentials (based on the auth cookie) and other criteria (post date, post count, whatever), and then generates a unique key that is sent as part of a redirect to the actual vote page (either in the query string or via HTTP POST). Then the logic on the receiving end could lookup that key to see if that user has voted before, etc. We could sign the requests to ensure authenticity, and so on.

Making that sort of site is easy. The problem is, like I told Seiji when he mentioned it, animesuki would have to provide an open authentication server so that we can (securely) assert: (a) people are members of the site, (b) every member gets only 1 vote (c) no funny business is happening (people are creating multiple accounts with no posts), etc.

People would just make bogus accounts 1 week before. Honestly though we just need a user id/name and I can just make a script to verfiy if they have posts using the member list (and find posts feature; since profiles can be disabled).

And I'm not going to build anything that handles damn passwords (ever!). Trust me nobody wants to build something that handles passwords from another site, that's how stupid shit happens.

Quote:

Originally Posted by relentlessflame

As for the authentication API to validate the participants... it could be possible. Just need to think about how to program it. For example, we could potentially host a script on the forum server that validates your login credentials (based on the auth cookie) and other criteria (post date, post count, whatever), and then generates a unique key that is sent as part of a redirect to the actual vote page (either in the query string or via HTTP POST). Then the logic on the receiving end could lookup that key to see if that user has voted before, etc. We could sign the requests to ensure authenticity, and so on.

Anyway, there are probably ways of doing it that aren't so hard.

There are actually established protocols for this, but I don't mind some homebrew if it's secure (my biggest concern with a homebrew solution would be a member being able to forge the identity of another legitimate member; algorithmically, though a flaw in the process etc).

There are actually established protocols for this, but I don't mind some homebrew if it's secure (my biggest concern with a homebrew solution would be a member being able to forge the identity of another legitimate member).

I didn't do a great deal of research yet, but at first glance it doesn't seem that our version of vBulletin supports an auth API without a third-party plugin (and I don't want to add another plugin to vBulletin right now). If you think there is a way of doing it with what we have without any code, feel free to propose it. I just figured I knew something could be written.

In the end, it should be written such that the odds of auth forgery are no more or less possible than they are on the forum itself, so I assume there is a procedure in place. But again, this is only my initial stab at the problem in concept.

For example on this site: http://stackoverflow.com/users/login you can login/register with your google account. If you say use google, they are sending a request to google (oauth 2.0 protocol I believe), you login via google, then google sends a request back to the site with your credentials (and various security tokens to confirm no funny business is going on), and you're logged in. You generally don't even have to enter username/password nonsense since you might already be logged in google, so as far as you're concerned you pressed a google button and you're logged in on the account associated with your gmail address.

...We're not installing/implementing an oAuth server just to make an off-site vote script work. We don't need to become an oAuth Provider. I'm willing to come up with something just for this project, but off-site auth is not generally something we need (or want) to do.